[R] Get background colour of terminal

[Jeff Newmiller]

You can capture stdin using system(), but you should be cautious as this whole mechanism is highly OS-and-configuration-specific. R is not always running connected to a terminal, and not all terminals respond to the same escape commands.

On February 21, 2022 1:25:05 AM PST, Jan van der Laan <rhelp using eoos.dds.nl> wrote:
>
>
>I am trying to get the background colour of the terminal R is running 
>in. There is a xterm control sequence for that: running the following in 
>a suitable terminal returns the background colour:
>
>cat("\033]11;?\033\\")
>
>Except that the result is written to stdin and I can't seem to figure 
>out how to get that into a variable in R.
>
>Following a shell script example from stackoverflow [1], I had a little 
>bit of success using
>
>cat("\033]11;?\033\\")
>Sys.sleep(1)
>bg <- readLines(n=1)
>
>where one has to press an enter manually, but this is not something that 
>can be put into a function.
>
>Wrapping that shell script into a system call works. That does introduce 
>some dependencies, but on systems where this is relevant sh and sed are 
>probably present anyway. But I still would prefers an R-solution.
>
>Does anyone know how one can get the background colour of the terminal R 
>is running in?
>
>Suggestions other than using the xterm control sequence are, of course, 
>also welcome. Perhaps a c-routine that can be wrapped into a Rcpp-call?
>
>Thanks for the help.
>
>Best,
>Jan
>
>
>
>[1] 
>https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2507337/how-to-determine-a-terminals-background-color
>
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-- 
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